


The Poetry Club at the End of the World

by maelidify



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 18+, F/M, Mild Smut, Near Future, alternate apocalypse au, wherein murphy reads poetry a lot I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 06:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13160766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maelidify/pseuds/maelidify
Summary: They've missed the last ship off a doomed planet, but maybe there's still something worth finding in this place.





	The Poetry Club at the End of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [infernalandmortal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/infernalandmortal/gifts).



> This was originally published on tumblr as a gift exchange present to the wonderful and skilled infernalandmortal (who, incidentally, also formatted it and probably edited it too).

* * *

_There are ghosts in this place._

_There always have been. The world is a spinning marble of ghosts, of anger and pain and the ways we deny ourselves love. They are made of fire and air and memory, and we keep them walking. We give them their breath, their steps._

_And like everything else, the world will fade._

_What will the ghosts do then?_

* * *

“ _I dread the time when your mouth begins to call me hunter_.” 

The woman freezes. The words are soft but they scatter around the abandoned shopping mall. An audible echo, something broken. A cracked voice. A breath. 

This is an unsettling place, even without disembodied voices. It’s full of half-closed shops and silent, fully-clothed mannequins. The inhabitants of this city may have been the first to know about the comet, but makes sense to not take the time to disintegrate your businesses, your home, your power structures. Pack your favorite things, get in the ship, and to hell with the rest. 

(She knows what she would have taken, had she the chance. She almost wishes she had given them to her brother. The separation hadn’t been anticipated, but she can’t think too hard about that, not yet.) 

The woman knows that to say  _hello?_  would be an invitation to an even-sooner death than the one awaiting. The faction gangs still around in the other areas of the state are violent, fractured. She would know. This wealthier city might be all but abandoned (and, for all intents and purposes, boarded up) but the condemned will probably all file in sooner or later like she did. 

Still, she creeps forward, wishing the former inhabitants had at least dimmed the fluorescent lights when the switched off the music and bailed to the nearest port. This is a strange place to be, this city. A city of hope. 

Hell. She has four knives hidden on her person, she can risk it. “Hello?” she decides on, and the voice drifts off. 

She waits a minute. There are birds in this place, nesting near the ceiling and the tops of pillars. White, hungry things that twitter stupidly at her words. They have no idea, or maybe they have every idea.  

“Hello?” she says again. “You scared or something?” 

That warrants a low chuckle. Something she can work with, at least. 

“I don’t scare easily,” the voice says after a moment’s pause. A smile twists onto her face. 

“You alone?” she asks, keeping the amusement out of her voice. If this is a game, it is an intangibly comforting one.  

“Something like that,” he says. He has a wry, faint voice. It’s coming from a nearby kiosk and the woman makes her steps lighter, softer. 

“This is my place to squat,” he continues, voice rising, “and to eventually die. Get your own.” 

When she ducks around the corner and crouches in front of him she is met with wide, surprised eyes– blue like some sort of lightning, and his face sharp, and his hair tangled. His hands are closed around a paperback. His knuckles are whitened and he doesn’t blink, just stares at her. 

Her breath halts in her throat for a moment. 

“Sure. It’s a big mall,” she finally says, smiling slowly. Then she grabs his book and runs off. 

—

The man thinks,  _I should probably go after her._

He thinks,  _That book was all I had left._

It’s funny how fucking pointless possessions are. They always have been. They live on a whole planet of possessions, just  _shit_  that no one has ever needed to use. And now the rock is coming, and the ships have left, and everyone can probably watch their shit grow smaller and smaller as they travel whoever the fuck knows where. 

It’ll all be gone in three days.

The man doesn’t move, even though he can hear the woman’s faint footsteps retreat. Her face– something warm and strange in her eyes, and that faction tattoo curling over her cheek. He wasn’t one to appreciate or even notice beauty, but if it did indeed exist, well…

He liked this kiosk a lot when people actually ran it. It sold small bobbleheads of dogs and cats and guinea pigs and they all looked kinda frantic and demented and maybe there’s some sort of kinship there. He stares at a bobblehead of a dog with its tongue sticking out. 

 _Go after her_ , the weird dog seems to say.  _Get your pointless shit back. Why not? You’re gonna die anyway._

“You make a good point,” he says conversationally, and then throws the plastic dog over a railing, noting the faint plastic thud it makes upon impact. He wonders if it’ll leave a ghost. Then he decides to find the woman. 

* * *

It is a book of poems by Leonard Cohen.

The woman finds a nicely-lit corner of the mall, on the second floor near a glass window and an arcade, and reads. Her life before (back when there was life left) had been full of running and stealing and killing. Cities didn’t have room for people like her. She’d barely finished school, but there was something about the quietness of books that always comforted her.

She knows the man will find her eventually. She anticipates it. So when she feels him approaching, she begins to read aloud.

“There are some men who should have mountains to bear their names to time.” She looks up. He’s standing across the room, a disheveled spector.

“Can I have it back now or what?”

“What’ll you give me for it?” she challenges. He reaches into a bag slung across his wide shoulders and tosses her a water bottle. It’s cold. “The fridges are still on,” he explains, and she sips it gratefully.

“Thanks,” she says. Then she says, “I’m Emori.”

“You’re crazy,” he counters, and sits next to her, back sliding against the green glass. “How’d you even get in here? The city was boarded up after the announcement.”

She remembers; the comet, hasty departures worldwide. This city had the main ports, and people rushed to them. It was why the walls were secured. To keep people like her out.

She and Otan had a whole plan to sneak aboard. It had backfired. This city was famous for keeping out the outsiders; she was lucky she’d made it into the city limits, and that her brother had made it aboard the ship. The last ship on earth. She still remembers it in fractures: The running and running,  the doors snapping shut. The roar of engines, the ensuing silence of televisions and radios.

Everyone was gone, and there was only violence left. An empty city, and the unproven possibility of factions waiting outside the walls. All of them with three slipping days.

“My brother and I bribed the guards,” she said. “He made it onto a ship. I fell behind.” She tries to say it casually, to solidify it in her mind. Her brother was going to survive the apocalypse and she wasn’t. It was that simple.

If something in the man softens, he’s good at hiding it.

“Sucks,” he says. He’s young. Probably no older than her. Younger, even.

“What about you?” she asks. “Why didn’t you make it onto a ship?”

He looks at her briefly, a flicker of something, and then looks away.

“I tried,” he said. “But they don’t let murderers on board.”

Ah. “How many?” she asks, studying his face, interested now. Their society has a low tolerance for homicide.

“Two,” he responds. “It doesn’t matter. I had my reasons.”

She looks at him and decides to show him. There’s ostracization written all over his face, a feeling she knows too well.

“I’ve killed too,” she says. “But _this_  is why I could never live in a city.” She takes off her glove and he looks at her with something like softness, and runs a finger down her hand, tracing the fused digits and crooked nubs. This should make her uncomfortable.

Instead, she feels something solid in his touch. A puzzle piece clicking in place.

“Well, that’s badass,” he says and she laughs in relief, not realizing there had been a tightness in her chest.

“You gonna give me your name or what?” she asks.

“M–” he starts, and cuts himself off. He looks at her, decides something. “John,” he says.

* * *

John Murphy remembers talking to his best friend about soulmates.

He had scoffed at it because he didn’t believe in that shit. “Fairy tales,” he’d said, simply, “for people who would rather be miserable than alone.”

“Shut up, Murphy,” she’d said in that super nice way of hers. “Just because you’ve anesthetized the parts of you that feel things doesn’t mean everyone else has.”

He looks at Emori now. There are a lot of things he doesn’t believe. A week ago, he wouldn’t have believed the planet would be destroyed so quickly, so casually. A month ago, he wouldn’t have believed he’d be falsely accused by his friends of a murder, and maybe he wouldn’t have believed he’d hurt and kill in retaliation. Maybe.

The woman is quiet, and the faction tattoo is dark on her golden skin. He doesn’t want to wax poetic, not when life has been such bullshit for him. He doesn’t want to be proven wrong and then die, like some sick joke.

“Which one are you reading now?” he asks.

“It’s about Isaiah,” she responds. “Something about him realizing the condemned city is beautiful.” She looks him in the eye and laughs, a bitter sound that still comes out warm, strong. “What a joke.”

In spite of himself, he grins.

“This your only book?” she asks, turning back to it.

“Yeah. Took it from my house before it burned down.” He doesn’t elaborate and she doesn’t press.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “I never read enough poetry. You know, before.”

“Too bad I only have the one poet,” he says, and it sounds like an offer in his voice.

She looks up at him and there’s a spark in her eyes, something warm and full of life. “John,” she says for the first time and god help him, his first name sounds  _actually kind of nice_ in her low, rich voice, “this entire city is abandoned.”

He can’t stop looking at her, her smile and the mischief in her face and he hates himself a little for that. “Yeah, and?”

“This is not your only book.”

* * *

The streets are quiet.

Emori has only seen a handful of movies in her life, and she’s never visited a soundstage, but she would imagine this is what one would feel like. There isn’t even a breeze in the air and the walls around the city seem to tighten strings around its confines, making everything feel smaller, eerier. There’s a row of apartment complexes across from the mall, flowers still littering the balconies along with chairs and laundry. Might as well start there.

“Did you hear that this city is haunted?” her companion asks mildly. She turns to him, looking up at him with a grin. He’s a bit taller than her and something about his presence behind her feels  _right_ , a strange mix between comfort and thrill she’s never quite experienced before.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she says.

He chuckles. “Good. If I’m going to spend the end of the world with someone, I’m glad she’s not a nutjob.”

“Says the boy who was reading poetry to no one,” she answers and he looks down and laughs. The end of the world. She feels an itching in her palms, the need to escape, to climb or run or hide. But there is no escape, not from something of this magnitude. “Let’s start with that one,” she says, indicating the first apartment with her gloved hand. Its porch is lined with flower pots, which are filled with wilting yellow buds. “I’ll teach you how to pick a lock.”

“Who’s to say I don’t already know?”

She studies him. “You don’t.”

A self-deprecating laugh. “Okay, I don’t.”

Why is this so easy? Her shoulder pressed against his shoulder. That shielded, sweetbitter grin in his eyes, like he doesn’t know what to make of her, like he’s afraid to let his guard down because then it’ll never come back up again.

She can see it so clearly because it’s there for her too, living between her shoulders. Living in her lungs. Almost like this stranger belongs next to her, dissolving her, letting her dissolve him.

Trying not to think too hard about it, she takes his hand and leads him to the door.

The first apartment has only a few books. Nora Roberts, a couple cookbooks (one of them is on Indian cooking, he notes with interest), a self-help book about codependency. There is a small volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets and Murphy pockets that, but the pickings are otherwise sparse.

Structurally, this kitchen is very similar to the one in his old apartment. He remembers his parents unbidden, struck suddenly by images from the past. His father’s worn suits, his mother’s empty vodka and pill bottles. They’d paid dearly to live in this city. He doesn’t want to think about executions and overdoses so he slinks out to the living room.   
  
Emori has made short work of the couch. He watches her for a moment, the quick, methodical way she piles the cushions atop one another. A metal bar protrudes, part of a broken fold-out bed, and she grabs a knife from her pocket and swiftly stabs between the structure’s folded joints. He can imagine her attacking someone in that same methodical way, a quick, harsh job as a means to an end.   
  
It’s terrifying, but also a little bit of a turn-on.   
  
“I doubt they’re hiding poetry in their couch,” he says. “Unless it’s the dirty kind.”   
  
She doesn’t seem startled by his voice, which confirms a suspicion of his: she can hear anyone coming from a mile away. Maybe he shouldn’t feel so comfortable around her. And yet.  
  
“Who’s to say we don’t want that kind?” she says with a grin, glancing over her shoulder at him. Her eyes are warm and dark, piercing his with a kind of casual mischief.   
  
He _definitely does not_ blush.  

* * *

At the second apartment, they have more luck.

Its bulk consists of an entire room of bookshelves. Emori gazes up at it, marveling at the fact that she can savor this job. Her work for her previous employees had been quick, subtle. She never got to truly understand the people from whom she was stealing.

This person must have loved history. Aeschylus, Thucydides, Sophocles– plays and histories and epics from the classical world live side-by-side, clearly read to the bone. There are stories living in how the pages are tattered and thin and folded. Emori almost doesn’t want to reach out and touch the worn spines, but she does anyway.

“He’s missing one,” John says. He’s been taking this apartment in with a strange expression, part anger and part fondness. “I guess he took  _The Illiad_ with him.”

“A friend of yours?”

“Used to be.” He’s guarded again. This person must have hurt him. She takes his hand, instinctively, not even noticing which hand she’s using, and he tightens his grip for a moment before letting go.

“Hey, this looks poetic,” she says after the moment passes over them.  _Fragments of Sappho_. It’s a small volume, well-read like the others. She opens to an arbitrary page. “‘Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us.’” The words feel weighted with something, meaningful and sparse, but then she frowns. “That’s the whole poem?”

“It’s called a fragment for a reason. Throw it in the bag and let’s get out of here.”

She looks at him. He’s haunted by something here. When she takes his hand, she feels haunted too.

* * *

After perusing  _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ (Emori’s voice framing the words: “‘A heavy heart, beloved, have I borne from year to year until I saw thy face…’” And a pause. “It seems a little  _much_ , doesn’t it?”) they sleep for a couple hours on the kitchen floor of the fourth apartment, stiff and strange.

She tells Murphy about her favorite cons and he finds himself amazed at the quickness of her mind.

“So you stole someone’s  _house_ , basically,” he says. She laughs, digging through the low piles of books in the apartment they’re in, their fifth.

“It was a trailer,” she says.

“So basically a house.”

She grins up at him and he feels that twisting in his stomach again.

Murphy has been apprehended by ghosts ever since the last ship left. The ghosts were living at Bellamy’s apartment, and the street corner, and in the way everything is abandoned and broken. Like him, he thinks wryly.

There’s a ghost story to this woman too, to the way she carries herself, to her weirdly beautiful hand, to how skillfully she can steal things. But something about her feels more  _present_  than the pain, more solid. A living heartbeat. He doesn’t want to look at her in awe, to look at any human being like that, but he finds himself staring, over and over.

The seventh apartment, which they reach by the evening, has a loft and he watches her climb the ladder, trying not to make it obvious he’s watching.

“Throw me the bag,” she says, reaching out, and he does so. The loft is more like an alcove, a slight second story with a bed and a window. Her face is dark and beautific in those shadows, in the stain of the sunset through the window. Two days down, almost. His stomach turns at the thought of his life, of how much he has survived only to be counting down the hours.

“I’m gonna check the fridge,” he says. She waves at him from the loft and he wonders… well.

When he comes back, it’s with a concoction of mushrooms and pasta.

“Did you make that just now?” Emori asks with interest, taking the plates he hands up before swinging onto the ladder.

“Yeah. It’s nothing.”

She takes a bite and closes her eyes. “Fuck,” she says softly and something in his stomach warms and he hates that, hates how  _good_  and  _comfortable_ this is because it doesn’t make sense. It’s getting a glimpse at something beautiful right before an execution. It’s life, twisting its noose and laughing.

He settles next to her on the bed, where she has turned on a small light. The books are nested around them:  _Sonnets from the Portuguese, Fragments of Sappho,_ a thin book of poems called  _Portrait of my Lover as a Horse,_ an isolated copy of  _The Annotated Song of Songs_ , an ironic volume of Bukowski’s  _The Last Night of the Earth Poems_ and some other contemporary poets obtained up from the large, professorial stack of books at their last target.

And of course  _Stranger Music_. Leonard Cohen stares at him from the cover like a surly son of a bitch.

Emori is paging through a volume of e e cummings, sipping from the water bottle he’d given her earlier. She knows how to conserve her resources. “Was this guy high when he wrote… all of this?” she asks.

He peers over her shoulder.

 _This is the garden.   Time shall surely reap_  
and on Death’s blade lie many a flower curled,  
in other lands where other songs be sung;  
yet stand They here enraptured,as among  
The slow deep trees perpetual of sleep  
some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

They read silently.

“John,” she says after a moment, “there has to be a way to survive this.”

He looks down at her, her head nearly leaning against his chest, a tangle of dark hair caught in her lashes, and wishes there was.

* * *

They fall asleep side by side after reading about half of a volume of Anne Sexton. 

(Emori read a verse aloud as they drifted: “‘ _The end of the affair is always death. She’s my workshop. Slippery eye, out of the tribe of myself my breath finds you gone. I horrify those who stand by. I am fed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.’”_ His eyes seemed to fall closed, like someone listening to music.) 

When Emori wakes up from a dream about her brother, the room is still and half-broken by moonlight.

 _The mind has shed leaves alone for years,_ she finds herself silently quoting. A Robert Bly poem. She looks at John, calm in the midst of sleep. The sharp nose, the knotted hair. She can see his collarbones protrude from his shirt and she wants to run her fingers over them, over every bit of him.

But when she runs her thumb softly over his lower lip, he starts awake and grabs her wrist, fingers digging into her skin.

Her eyes widen. His eyes are sleep and fire. When he meets her gaze he swears and lets go, clambering halfway down the ladder before she can react.

“John,” she calls in futility. She can hear running water and climbs down to find him in the bathroom. “John,” she says again, but he won’t meet her eyes in the mirror as he splashes water on his face.

Then something settles over his features. A mask of some sort. He turns around and stares behind her.

“I’m fucked up,” he says simply, and pushes past her.

She leans against the doorway and thinks. The act of aggression hadn’t prompted a defensive response in her; she knows when she’s in true danger and is perfectly capable of escaping it. It’s a useful skill she has picked up over the years out of necessity, after hard lesson upon hard lesson.

He’s sitting in the living room, flicking a lighter on and off. The flame appears and snaps away. Soon, the sun will be up but Emori doesn’t look at the window, just at the lean curve of his spine, the way his thin long-sleeved shirt hangs off of him. 

“When my brother and I were kids, there was this man,” she begins. It shouldn’t be hard to say this by now. It shouldn’t. “He would beat us every day, just to keep us on our toes. We had to steal for him and his crew. It’s why we became what we are, why we’ve done what we’ve done.” 

He doesn’t say anything, but he snaps the lighter shut and doesn’t open it again. 

“Whoever hurt you… “ she begins and drifts off. She isn’t good at this, doesn’t quite know how to process this twisting feeling of sympathy in her gut. Feeling someone else’s pain… this feeling is alien, it doesn’t belong in her. She wants to run but she sits down carefully on the other side of the couch where he rests. 

“I… had a really shitty relationship,” he says finally. When he looks at her, she can hazard a guess as to what _shitty relationship_ entails. 

“Can I kill her?” she asks softly. “Or him?”

“It was a her,” he says shortly. She wants to take his hand. Almost as though reading her mind, he looks up at her and reaches out, and she realizes her left hand isn’t wrapped and she doesn’t care. The rough warmth of his skin is there. 

How could they have found this now? This quietness, this solace? 

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “Earlier.”

That wry grin is back and something flips in her stomach at his laugh, the shadows in his face, his hand on hers. “No, you absolutely should have.”

“When your touch gets betrayed, it makes sense that you would no longer want it.” 

“I want it,” he says. His eyes are so sharp, almost predatory, but the surge of energy coursing through her is far from fear. “And I want to stop talking about them. They can go to hell.” 

“They don’t matter,” she says. “This matters.” Whatever  _this_  is. 

He kisses her briefly, hungrily, a taste of tongue and sleep and pain. That sharp lean body warm and so near hers without quite touching. 

“As long as  _you_  want to,” he says, pulling back leaving her lips cold, and she sees a sliver of insecurity pass through him. She wants to cry out, to surround herself with everything that he is, everything she knows and doesn’t know.

“Come here,” she says. 

* * *

Murphy has never had particularly good associations with sex. It’s just another place where the ghosts live.

But, pulling Emori towards him, he feels like he could set a thousand fires at once.  _Why we’ve done what we’ve done_. There’s something fucked up in him, and she’s clearly done some fucked up things too, and all of that courses through him as he grips her waist. That understanding mixes with the feeling of her body against his like a flint.

He loses himself in it, kissing her neck, her jaw. She cries out and he  _likes_  it, that gasp, that startled laugh.

If she wanted to kill Ontari for him then he wants to tear apart everyone who has ever hurt her, that man she mentioned, anyone, but that sense of rage is nothing compared to  _this_. Her eyes closed, her hands tangled in his hair. He wants to show her every rough instinct and every gentle one too, and groans into her neck, pulling them backwards.

She settles on top of him, legs curled around his hips. He wants to unpeel every bit of her. As it is, his fingers stroke the soft skin of her hip and she moans. A low, pleased noise.

“Can I–?” he asks, almost desperate. He’s straining against his jeans and he lifts his hand to her breast carefully, gently. A question.

There’s something evaluating in her eyes, distanced for a moment. “I don’t usually do this,” she admits. “I’m not…”

He realizes she’s evaluating herself, showing a vulnerability she’s used to hiding. There are a lot of things she hides, aren’t there? He would say he doesn’t trust her but he trusts her in this moment absolutely, explicitly.

He takes her left hand in his and lifts it to his mouth, kissing the soft and rough skin, watching the look in her eyes dissolve.

And why the fuck not. “I dread the time when your mouth begins to call me hunter,” he starts, softly, hardly believing he’s quoting poetry right now but she’s worth it, she’s  _so_  worth it. “When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful, I want to summon the eyes and hidden mouths of stone and light and water to testify against you.”

“That was the poem,” she murmurs, a warm force of nature. “Thank you,” she says and he knows she’s thanking him for reading that poem aloud just yesterday. God. He wants to call her  _beautiful_ in every way he can.

“It’s called ‘Beneath my Hands,’” he offers, tracing her breast again, which makes her laugh, and it’s honestly a really nice sound.

“Subtle.”

“Never one of my best qualities,” he says, making her laugh again as he flips them over. There’s a fumbling handful of moments where they struggle out of their clothes and then she takes his hardness in her hand, and he wants to kiss and lick and bite every inch of her skin, scarred and not, the curve of her hip, the slope of her thighs, the warmth therein. He wants to keep it, every second. Her fingers tracing his collarbone. The warm laughter in her eyes. Everything gentle and everything rough.

They fuck like it’s the end of the world, which of course it is. 

* * *

This time, Emori wakes up with John’s arm slung around her. His fingers rest idly against her navel.

It is mid-morning on the last day of the world. She rolls over and nudges him awake carefully, not bothering to pull her thin blanket over herself. He stirs and regards her with a bit of morning hunger.

“Want to go again?” he says, voice thick with sleep.

“We fell asleep,” she says, but she grins as he runs his fingers down her arms, tracing her skin. Unbidden, she remembers his fingers curling inside her, and how tightly she had gripped his hair when she…

“You should get up,” she informs him, climbing off the couch.

“In a sense,” he agrees, and she smacks him on the arm before rummaging through her clothes, which are scattered on the floor. Half-dressed, she finds the earrings that fell off with her shirt and stares at them for a good moment. Long chains, frail coins dangling from the ends.

“They’re nice,” John offers, still reclining on the couch. “I mean, they look nice. On you.”

She scoffs a little. “I guess. Otan made them for me.”

“Your brother?”

She realizes she’s never mentioned him by name. “Yeah. I should have sent them with him. So part of me would survive.” She shakes her head, throwing her shirt on, tugging her left hand through the narrow cloth. “What a stupid thought.”

“Nah,” he says. “I get it.”

“Anything you wish?”

“That my friends hadn’t hated me,” he says, “before they left.”

She looks at him, at the beautiful, pained anomaly that is him, lying there on the couch. He looks back. Has anyone really  _seen_  her like this? Has she seen anyone like this? 

“They were fools,” she says, truthfully. 

“I did a lot to them. I lost it and killed a couple of people, I hurt my best friend…” his voice drifts off. “But yeah. They were.” 

“Tell me about your best friend.” She curls next to him on the couch and he puts a bare arm around her and grins, a little bitterly, a little fondly. 

“You would have liked her. She was smart, like you. Still is, I guess.”

She nestles into his arm, savoring his warmth. “I don’t think you would have liked Otan.” 

“You loved him. I would have managed.”

The words are there, hanging between them, silent and unspoken, their own kind of poetry. They’ve only known one another for two days. What a cruel trick life has played on them. 

“I’ve been wondering why I’m not running,” she says.

“Hmm?” 

“It’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. Running, trying to survive.”  _Stripping away pieces of myself_.

“Yeah? Me too.” He looks down at her. “It’s been a bitch.” 

She smiles a little and finds his hand. This mix of joy and sorrow pierces through her, something exquisite, something strange. “I think I’ve found it, though.” 

“Found what?” 

“My survival. This. You.”

He squeezes her fingers. His face is damp against her hair. 

* * *

_When the end comes, the sky is a flare of fire. The spinning marble changes quickly, structurally, the atmosphere shifting to accommodate new gases, whirling to accommodate the far-flung potential of new primordial life._

_And so when the spirits of a man and woman awake after the storm of fire and water, they realize they are the only ghosts that remain in this place._

_The woman reaches out her hand, which is beautiful and strange, and the man takes it. They are ready to wander this ruined planet._

_They will take their time._


End file.
